Tom Johnson, a composer and critic whose Village Voice columns documented the renaissance of avant-garde music in downtown New York through the Nineteen Seventies, and whose personal compositions embraced minimalism and mathematical readability, died on Tuesday at his dwelling in Paris. He was 85.
His spouse and solely instant survivor, the efficiency artist Esther Ferrer, mentioned the trigger was a stroke following long-term emphysema.
Mr. Johnson was a younger New York composer in want of earnings in 1971 when he observed that the thrilling performances he heard downtown weren’t being lined by native information shops. He supplied to write down concerning the up to date music scene for The Voice, and he quickly started a weekly column.
It was an opportune second: Artwork galleries, lofts and venues just like the Kitchen had been presenting live shows by younger experimenters like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and Mr. Johnson grew to become the rising scene’s chief chronicler.
“Nobody realized on the time that one of the important genres of great music of the century was growing, a style that was to turn out to be often known as American minimalism, and which might discover imitators all around the world,” he wrote in 1983, in his last Voice column.
He charted the rise of musical minimalism, together with the transformation of the native composer Phil Glass to a global phenomenon, however he additionally documented radical work by lesser-known figures: Yoshi Wada, who sang by large plumbing pipes; Jim Burton, who amplified bicycle wheels; and Eliane Radigue, who created uncanny drones on a synthesizer.
“I discovered some fascinating issues about gongs on Could 30 at a Centre Avenue loft live performance,” Mr. Johnson wrote of a 1973 present by the younger composer Rhys Chatham. “That gongs have many alternative pitches, most of which don’t make a lot sense by way of the overtone collection; that totally different tones stand out, relying on how the gong is struck; that when a gong makes a crescendo, a beautiful whoosh of excessive sound streams into the room; that loud gongs vibrate the ground in a particular approach and put an odd cost within the air; that listening to gongs, performed alone for over an hour, is a rare expertise.”
By describing such outré happenings in matter-of-fact, observational prose, Mr. Johnson supplied a nationwide readership with entry to performances that is perhaps attended by solely a dozen listeners, and probably by no means heard once more. He noticed himself as a participant throughout the scene, and he supplied such beneficiant protection that he grew to become identified amongst composers as “Saint Tom.” His writings, collected within the 1989 guide “The Voice of New Music,” provide a uniquely intimate portrait of a galvanizing musical period; for one memorable column, Mr. Johnson sang within the refrain for a rehearsal of Mr. Glass’s landmark opera “Einstein on the Seashore.”
However Mr. Johnson was additionally unafraid to critique live shows that he thought didn’t work conceptually, or notice when he fell asleep. Some columns took formal dangers. He as soon as devoted a thousand phrases to reviewing “one of the spectacular performances I ever heard”: the warbling of a mockingbird on Lengthy Island.
He was among the many first writers to start utilizing the time period “minimal” to explain a lot of the repetitive music he heard, and he utilized the phrase to his personal compositions, such because the hypnotic 1971 work “An Hour for Piano.” “I’ve at all times been very happy with it, as a result of that’s the one phrase that actually describes what I’m doing,” he mentioned in a 2014 interview. “I at all times labored with decreased supplies and tried to do easy music.”
In Mr. Johnson’s dryly postmodern “4 Notice Opera,” a quartet sings arias about arias — on solely the notes A, B, D and E. The primary efficiency, in 1972, had an viewers of about 10 folks; the opera has since obtained greater than 100 productions. For “9 Bells” (1979), he walked amongst a grid of suspended burglar alarm bells for almost an hour, chiming them in predetermined sequences, a feat of geometric precision and bodily exertion.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, he immersed himself in Euclid’s quantity theories and Mandelbrot’s fractals, keen to search out new musical buildings. His compositions of this era embrace “Rational Melodies,” a collection of entrancing miniatures constructed from easy, symmetrical patterns, and “The Chord Catalog,” a methodical two-hour presentation of the 8,178 chords that may be present in a single octave.
Although undergirded by his mathematical workouts, Mr. Johnson’s music is visceral and intelligible — and, typically, intentionally predictable — moderately than abstruse. “There’s something notably satisfying about tasks the place the logic (the music) appears to come up naturally from some discovery exterior of myself, and the place the whole lot comes along with a minimal of tampering (of composing),” he as soon as wrote.
Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on Nov. 18, 1939, in Greeley, Colo., a small farming neighborhood. His mother and father, Harold Francis Johnson and Irene (Barber) Johnson, had been lecturers.
When he was about 7, Tom started enjoying the piano intermittently, and he discovered his ardour for music at age 13 below the tutelage of an area piano instructor, Rita Hutcherson, who additionally inspired his composing.
Although a lot of his friends attended close by universities, Ms. Hutcherson urged Mr. Johnson to use to Yale, the place he obtained a bachelor’s diploma in arts in 1961 and a grasp’s in music in 1967. As an undergraduate, he took a seminar with the distinguished composer Elliott Carter and dabbled in 12-tone composition, the lingua franca of the musical academy, however he discovered himself embracing repetition and stasis as a substitute of cerebral complexity. He moved to New York in 1967 to check privately with the experimental composer Morton Feldman, who helped him discover his inventive voice.
After documenting the New York scene for The Voice however struggling to have his personal work carried out, Mr. Johnson decamped to Paris in 1983, the place contemporary alternatives awaited, as European audiences had been newly drawn to the American avant-garde. There he remained a prolific author, theorizing about his personal music in a number of books. He had been publishing his personal scores for the reason that Nineteen Seventies, and he maintained an energetic net presence with a video collection elucidating his music.
His main works have included the satirical “Riemannoper,” based mostly on excerpts from a famed German music lexicon, which has obtained greater than 30 productions; and a extra severe oratorio drawing on the writings of the German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However a lot of Mr. Johnson’s output remained resolutely summary, together with an orchestral work that lays out a sequence of 360 chords and a collection of current items that systematically discover varied rhythmic combos.
Mr. Johnson’s marriage to the choreographer Kathy Duncan led to divorce. He married Ms. Ferrer in 1986.
One in all Mr. Johnson’s compositions has turn out to be canonic within the double-bass neighborhood: “Failing” (1975), a fiendishly tough and hilarious train through which a soloist is instructed to bow difficult passages whereas studying a prolonged textual content aloud that self-reflexively feedback on the music. “These items all needed to do with making music as actual life,” Mr. Johnson mentioned of the work in a 2020 interview. “I wished the performer to confront an unknown state of affairs and cope with it in addition to attainable in a one-time-only context.”
